Women at work.

School Offers New Measure Of Success

The unspoken definition of "success" in business matches the American Heritage dictionary's secondary description of the noun: "the gaining of fame or prosperity."

Being on a power trip long has been the way business defines "success," but with women continuing to influence the labor market, the meaning of "success" is being scrutinized-and rejected.

"The traditional definition of success is male, and very much an Ivy League definition," said Margaret Hennig, dean of Simmons College's graduate school of management in Boston.

"It measures success by how many steps you climb up, status you acquire, resources you command, position in the hierachy and making more money.

"It's always the same thing: At every point, you must be ahead of where you were before, and if you are an MBA, at least equal to or ahead of your peer group in the program."

The current business definition of success must change, says Hennig, co-dean with Anne Jardim at Simmons, a women's college. The two also are co-authors of the 1977 best-seller, "The Managerial Woman."

Hennig was one of 13 women among 700 men in the first MBA class at Harvard to admit women, and graduated in 1964; Jardim is a graduate of the London School of Economics. The co-deans met at Harvard while earning their doctorates in business administration.

They knew then that women needed a new, more flexible kind of MBA schooling, something not male-oriented.

"When I was at Harvard, unless you became president, CEO or chair of a major organization, you were not considered successful," said Hennig. "But 10 years ago, we began to see a change in what success means."

According to Hennig, success is "setting your own definition of success, controlling it and having choices-whether or not your school or peers consider you a failure. It means considering both professional and personal goals, including the quality of life and balancing work and family."

Implicit in this definition is that if women, by choice, don't reach the top of their professions, it's OK. But the worry is that such an approach plays right into the hands of the men who built the iron gates and glass ceilings to keep women out in the first place.

Hennig, whose school recently held a conference for women on redefining success, says not to worry. " `Success' means if you want to be chair of Ford Motor Co., that's your goal and go for it," she said. "If you have a family and other interests and are happy to make less money, you're still a success."

Successful women were what Hennig and Jardim, then both on the faculty of Harvard business school, had in mind when they founded the Simmons graduate management program in 1974. It offers the only MBA degree program in the U.S. that focuses on women in management.

Some 2,100 women have graduated from Simmons' 11-month MBA program for full-time students and its two- to three-year part-time track. Simmons also has executive development programs, management seminars and "record-breaking" job placement of graduates.

"We built into our school programs that success means feeling free to make choices-regardless what the choices are," said Hennig.

Audrey Peeples, executive director of the YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago, has an MBA in management from Northwestern University.

Peeples' agency for women has an $8.5 million annual budget and a staff of 250. "Success should be doing what you want to do, no matter what the cost," said Peeples, also chair of The Chicago Network Inc., an organization of top-ranking women. "That may mean you're not always home for dinner, or that you truthfully tell your boss you have to leave to go to a kid's recital. Success has to include the fact that women have two or three `careers.' "

Success is not only running a Fortune 500 company, Peeples said.

"Success means managing all the things in your life," said the director, who is married and has two children. "I feel I'm a success because I'm successfully running a non-profit agency and balancing that with my family and outside social interests."